FitWell Gym is interested in forecasting its monthly membership sign-ups over 12 months. The average monthly sign-ups for the past 12 months are provided as follows:

The gym manager is open to suggestions for forecasting models and decides to try both a linear trend model and an adjusted exponential smoothing model with an alpha of 0.4 and a beta of 0.3.

1. Generate forecasts for all 12 months using these techniques and then calculate forecast errors using MAD to determine which is the superior method in this scenario.
2. Using the superior method, what is the forecast for Month 13?

What to submit: The final submission must be ONE Excel (or Word or PDF) file with answers to all the questions (one sheet per question).

\begin{tabular}{|c|c|} \hline Month & Sign-ups \\ \hline 1 & 150 \\ \hline 2 & 165 \\ \hline 3 & 140 \\ \hline 4 & 170 \\ \hline 5 & 185 \\ \hline 6 & 175 \\ \hline 7 & 155 \\ \hline 8 & 180 \\ \hline 9 & 200 \\ \hline 10 & 215 \\ \hline 11 & 195 \\ \hline 12 & 225 \\ \hline \end{tabular}